1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to diagnostic testing and assessment. More particularly, the present invention relates generally to diagnostic testing and assessment regarding spelling.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the study of language development has broadened over the years to include the recognition of reading and spelling as language skills, so, too, has the need to develop systematic and informative procedures for determining deficiencies in literate language development. Unfortunately, unlike the readily available literature on the assessment of early language skills, few specific guides for comprehensive literacy skills assessment are available. This is most notably apparent for spelling assessment. Without a well-designed method for determining the presence of a disability and the possible factor(s) that may be causing the disability, language and literacy specialists may be less effective in their spelling intervention.
There are three basic methods used to determine the status of a student""s spelling skills. In the first, dictation, the examiner reads aloud a list of words and the student is instructed to write the spelling for each. In the second, connected writing, the student is asked to generate text in response to a picture or as a story retell. In the third, recognition, the student is given a group of words that contain the correct spelling along with a few misspellings, or foils. The student is asked to indicate which spelling is correct.
Dictationxe2x80x94Standardized Tests
There are several standardized tests or subtests that employ dictated word lists. A raw score is calculated from each test or subtest and then converted into derived scores, such as a standard score/quotient, percentile, age equivalency and grade equivalency. These tests meet the minimal standards of the American Psychological Association for technical adequacy. Consequently, clinicians or teachers who must have a standard score for justification of placement in special education services may benefit from administration and scoring of one of these tests or subtests. However, Moats judged the tests inadequate for sufficiently sampling the domain of spelling, or the child""s knowledge of English orthographic patterns.
Dictationxe2x80x94Word Inventories
The use of word lists to evaluate spelling skills has been in practice for decades. Many spelling text books have short test lists that precede each instructional unit. Approaches that are based upon typical spelling development often employ word lists to elicit data for. Examples include the inventory lists that appear in Tables 1 and 2. These lists are valuable because they are designed to elicit words that represent specific types of spelling knowledge that occur at various points in the developmental process.
The domain of spelling is large, incorporating knowledge of orthographic patterns, sound-symbol correspondences, homophones, compounds, and morphological constructions (e.g., contractions, Latin plurals, and assimilated prefixes). Table 3 illustrates a content domain in English spelling. However, there is no single, comprehensive list that can be used to gather all pertinent data. Further, the nature of data that would be desired would be dependent upon the developmental level of the student being evaluated. Other such lists can be helpful with students who are in the earliest stages of spelling acquisition or when assessing students who are at the intermediate stages of spelling acquisition. These lists are scored by a variety of methods, including calculation of the number correct; identifying levels of mastery, instruction, and frustration; and analysis of the types or features of the spellings that are used. Many of these methods yield some type of developmental level, which can be used to determine whether a student is at the expected level of spelling proficiency. Regardless of which list is chosen, the wise language and literacy specialist will realize that it likely represents a starting point for data collection, and, depending on the profile of correct and error spellings used by the child, additional data will likely be necessary.
Connected Writing
Some language and literacy specialists may be concerned about using only word lists in spelling assessment because lists are decontextualized and have no communicative value. Further, performance on word lists often does not mirror spelling during actual classroom writing tasks. Parents and professionals often lament the fact that children will score high on weekly spelling tests, yet continue to misspell numerous words in connected writing. Spelling accuracy may be influenced by the writing topic, motivation to write accurately, attention to task, and response mode (e.g., computer versus handwriting).
There are a few standardized tests with subtests designed to measure spelling skills in connected writing. For example, on one such test, the student is asked to generate a written story in response to a stimulus picture. Data are scored by subtracting the number of different misspelled words in the story from the total number of different words in the story. The raw scores may be converted to a percentile or standard score. Unfortunately, such subtests simply do not contain a sufficient number of words representing the necessary orthographic patterns to make the scores meaningful or helpful.
Another type of test involves the use of retellings to gather additional data on error patterns initially identified through single-word dictation tasks. Words are selected that represent three or four error patterns of interest and construct a story that contains those words. The child writes the story as it is told by the examiner. The examiner tells the story in narrative fashion, pausing between story elements so that the student has time to write each portion. The student""s completed version of the story is then dictated in subsequent administrations for the purposes of charting response to treatment. This approach seems to have promise, as long as a sufficient number of exemplars representing each targeted pattern are included. Limiting the number of targeted patterns to four or five it possible to construct a story of reasonable length. Coupled with the data gathered from inventories, the opportunities for target pattern use in connected writing hold promise for valid measurement of spelling skills.
Recognition
Although recognition is commonly used in formal assessment of spelling, its value has, at the least, been questioned and, at the most, been dismissed altogether. The spelling subtest of the Peabody Individualized Achievement Test-Revised is typical of recognition tasks. It consists of 100 items, which, according to the authors, address basic visual discrimination, phonological awareness, and sound-symbol association. Each of the spelling items contains a correct spelling of the target word along with 3 misspellings. For each item, the examiner reads the target word and uses it in a sentence. The student is instructed to mark the correct spelling, and each item marked correctly increases the raw score by one point. Raw scores are converted into typical derived scores, such as a standard score/quotient, percentile, age equivalency and grade equivalency. Certainly the task of identifying misspelled words is different from formulating spellings. However, proofing is an important component of spelling skills and, whether through standardized identification tests or individualized tasks, the language and literacy specialist will likely want to see how the student responds to correct and incorrect spellings of target forms.
Description of Spelling Skills
Determining that a student""s spelling skills are below expected levels and that intervention is needed is only the first part of the assessment process. The data will need to be further analyzed in order to optimally formulate goals for instruction or treatment and establish appropriate baseline information for measuring the effectiveness of intervention. Consequently, the next step in the assessment process is to describe the child""s specific spelling skills.
A variety of taxonomies have been used to describe children""s spelling. Some of these are more general and based primarily on the linguistic category of the intended form. For example, errors may be designated as occurring on homophones, consonants, vowel errors, inflected words, and reversals. Although this is helpful in quantifying misspellings, this type of analysis may not be as helpful in identifying goals for instruction.
Other systems focus on the forms used by the student, often referred to as invented spellings, to gain insight regarding the student""s knowledge of the spelling system. The inventories in Tables 1 and 2 include lists of words that are arranged in order of increasing complexity. Bear and his colleagues provide a check sheet and an error guide that are used to assign each spelling (whether correct or in error) to a specific stage (preliterate, early letter name, letter name, within word pattern, syllable juncture, derivational constancy). For example, for the target word train, the spellings j, t, trn indicate early letter name performance, jran, chran, tan, tran indicate letter name performance, and teran, traen, trane, and train indicate performance at the within-word pattern stage.
A slightly different approach for scoring inventory responses is illustrated in Tables 1 and 2. Orthographic features that are important for the spelling level of interest (i.e., primary or elementary) are identified and then points are assigned for the inclusion of a designated feature in a given word. A total score for each feature is calculated. If a child uses the feature correctly in all of the targets or misses only once, the child is considered to have mastered the feature. If the child uses the feature correctly in some words, yet misses it in two or more other words, that feature is considered an appropriate instructional target. If the child misses the feature in all of the target words, it is considered beyond her instructional level.
The approaches are particularly good as they have the advantage of encouraging the language and literacy specialist to look systematically at the types of spellings the student is using and make a hypothesis as to developmental level on the basis of these spellings. A potential shortcoming of these approaches, however, is the assignment of a student to a single stage or, at least, the transition between two stages. This is sometimes difficult because the data may not fit clearly within one stage. Stage theories may not fully account for the notion that children use multiple strategies and different kinds of knowledge (phonologic, orthographic, morphological) throughout the course of spelling development. Further, it is possible that a skill that appears to be mastered at a lower stage will become problematic again when word complexity increases. For example, representation of each sound with a letter is considered a basic skill and is thought to be mastered during the letter-name stage of development, which is certainly appropriate when considering monosyllabic words. However, as structural complexity increases and the student attempts to spell three- and four-syllable words, s/he may xe2x80x9crevertxe2x80x9d to a failure to represent every sound with a letter.
Evaluation of Related Abilities
Spelling skills have been linked to a number of other literacy and literacy-related skills, including reading, phonological awareness, and morphological knowledge. Researchers have found strong correlations between spelling and reading, phonemic awareness, and morphological knowledge. Thus, it is wise to obtain data regarding the status of a student""s skills in these areas. Such additional assessment of these skills not only provides insight into the student""s overall pattern of strengths and weaknesses, but it also can be used later to formulate hypotheses regarding the nature of the specific spelling errors made by the student.
Reading
The ties between reading and spelling have been recognized for some time. As children read, they become exposed to the orthographic patterns and morphological markers that they must replicate in their spellings. Some studies have demonstrated the direct influence reading has on spellings of new words. An assessment of a student""s reading abilities, then, will allow the language and literacy specialist to determine a possible co-occurring reading deficit as well as to identify a possible causative or maintaining factor for the spelling deficit.
Reading assessment typically takes the form of both standardized and non-standardized measures. Several standardized reading tests are available. Such tests most often assess a student""s ability to (a) identify or recognize familiar words (i.e., sight-word reading), (b) decode or sound out unfamiliar or nonsense words (i.e., phonetic decoding), and (c) comprehend passages of text, either through cloze procedures or by answering factual or inferential questions regarding the text. These tests offer the examiner the ability to determine whether a student is within normal limits, but, like the standardized spelling tests discussed above, these measures provide little insight into the causes for reading difficulty or suggestions for intervention.
Miscue analysis, a non-standardized means to assess reading abilities, requires the language and literacy specialist to record all errors, or miscues, as a student reads aloud from a text. Patterns of errors are identified, such as errors of reversals, semantic substitutions, insertions or deletions of sounds, etc. By examining the types of errors present during reading, the language and literacy specialist may develop a better understanding of other literacy-related skills known to be foundational skills to both spelling and reading that are deficient, including phonemic and morphological awareness.
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is the ability to think about and manipulate the speech sound segments of a language. For some time, phonological awareness, along with a knowledge of letter sound-correspondence, has been shown to be a strong predictor for spelling development. Development of phonological awareness progresses from early awareness of rhymes, alliteration, and sound play in the preschool years to later awareness of the individual sound segments that make up words. It is this latter skill, the ability to segment words into individual phonemes, that seems to best predict students"" spelling abilities in children in the early elementary grades. While the relationship between phonological awareness and spelling appears to be reciprocal (i.e., practice with each helps the other), students need some phonological awareness skills to begin to decode words and translate phonemes into graphemes. Thus, segmentation tasks can be used to identify early possible cause and/or maintaining factors for spelling impairments.
There are several standardized measures of phonological awareness available to the language and literacy specialist to assess phonemic awareness skills. Some of these tests focus exclusively on phonemic segmentation skills. Others include a number of different phonological awareness tasks in addition to segmentation tasks, such as phonemic blending and generating words from phonemes. While these tests vary in the ages on which they are normed and their psychometric strength, they nevertheless are means to determine how explicitly a student is able to think about the sound segments of the language.
For students who demonstrate difficulties in segmenting words into phonemes, language and literacy specialists can hypothesize that spelling will be affected. However, phonological awareness is not the only literacy-related skill that affects spelling abilities. Morphological awareness, which relies on a student""s phonological, semantic, and syntactic knowledge, also plays a critical role in spelling development.
Morphological Awareness
Morphological awareness involves the ability to be conscious of and manipulate the morphological units of a language. It involves the ability to identify root words and their inflected or derived forms. Awareness of morphological structure plays an important role in spelling. Because many word spellings cannot be explained or written using phonological knowledge, the explicit use of morphological knowledge becomes an increasingly important spelling strategy as students mature.
A strong relationship between morphological knowledge and spelling has been established. Performance on morphological judgment tasks correlate significantly with general measures of spelling. Like phonological awareness, morphological awareness has a reciprocal relationship with spelling. Experiences with spelling lead to greater understanding of the use of certain morphological forms, while an understanding of grammatical morphology leads to better or more accurate spelling.
Although there are standardized tests that can be administered to assess phonological awareness, language and literacy specialists must rely on the spelling literature to construct non-standardized measures of morphological. Several techniques have been used to assess students"" morphological knowledge, including spelling lists, cloze procedures, word judgment tasks, and suffix addition tasks. Using spelling lists, researchers have asked young students to spell words that are phonetically similar on some aspect yet morphologically different on another (e.g., words containing two morphemes ending in a consonant cluster, such as tuned, versus words containing one morpheme ending in a consonant cluster, such as brand). In cloze procedure tasks, student hear a word followed by a sentence, and then are asked to complete the sentence with either the derived form or the root form of the word initially presented (e.g., magic, David Copperfield is a _). Students show most success on these tasks when they are given a derived form and are asked to provide the root word. Word judgment tasks require students to determine whether a pair of words represents a root word and either a fake (table-vegetable) or real (teach-teacher) derived form. Students must apply their knowledge of suffixes to nonsense words in suffix addition. These tasks are similar to the familiar wug/wugs task, except students write their responses.
Poor morphological awareness skills may be due to poor reading skills. With decreased or inadequate reading skills, there are fewer opportunities to benefit from repetitive exposures to inflectional and derivational morphology in spelling. In addition, poor morphological awareness skills may result from an overall deficit in general metalinguistic skills. Thus, it is appropriate to assess other metalinguistic skills, including semantic and syntactic awareness, as well as additional language skills that may impact on students"" spelling abilities.
Additional Language Skills
Because spelling may be indicative of a more general, although subtle, language problem, it is important to assess other areas of language as well. Semantic and syntactic awareness may be measured using a number of standardized tests. For example, one such test requires students to actively think about word order (sentence combining and word ordering subtests) and the semantic similarities among groups of words (vocabulary and generals subtests). Similarly, another such test contains subtests that assess measure syntactic and semantic awareness skills (e.g., word classes and sentence assembly subtests). Findings from these tests may explain deficits in morphological awareness as well as prove to be important when designing intervention stimuli and activities. The language and literacy specialist must consider whether material will be too challenging or demanding of the child""s working memory resources.
Other areas of language, including oral and written narrative discourse, and complex syntactic structures in oral and written language should be assessed to determine possible factors that may increase the demands needed to complete a writing task. If narrative and/or syntactic skills are delayed or deficient, then the working memory demands they place on a writer constructing a text may be great, resulting in a less than optimal level of resources devoted to the task of spelling. Findings such as this will influence the manner in which spelling is facilitated during intervention.
Finally, other factors may influence spelling development, such as cognitive development and the type of formal spelling instruction received in a school setting. Although these factors may have important ramifications, their current status should not have a direct bearing on the method the language and literacy specialist uses for spelling assessment. Consequently, one of ordinary skill in the art is directed elsewhere for pertinent.
The present invention focuses on the description of patterns of errors that are present in spellings. As with most methods of language assessment, the identification of patterns of either correct or incorrect spellings depends upon the collection of adequate data. Administration of a standardized test of spelling and one or more of the qualitative inventories previously described provides a sufficient beginning. Samples of the student""s classroom writing also should be collected and added to the database. All of the student""s spellingsxe2x80x94correct as well as incorrectxe2x80x94should be documented. As these words are analyzed, care should be given to the linguistic and situational contexts (e.g. dictation, connected writing within narratives) from which they are derived. These contexts may affect accuracy and performance, as described below.
The next step is to identify patterns of spelling errors (i.e., mistakes that characterize more than one misspelling) that are present in the student""s sample. Familiarity with the components of the English spelling domain (Table 3), as well as with common error patterns (Table 4), helps with initial descriptions. Most of the errors encountered should fit into one of the items on these lists, and any remaining errors can be characterized by descriptive statements developed by the language and literacy specialist. Because the occurrence of many errors can be influenced by word complexity, pattern statements may need to be refined to reflect considerations such as syllabic structure.
The language and literacy specialist should identify three or four patterns that will ultimately become the initial focus of intervention. Selection of these patterns should based on several factors. First, error patterns that operate with a reasonable degree of frequency should be selected. Decisions regarding this reasonable degree are not always straightforward. Certainly, an error that occurs on only a few of the possible opportunities would not be a priority for intervention based on the premise that the pattern will continue to be gradually mastered. On the other hand, when errors operate more frequently the likelihood of eventual acquisition is decreased. No set criterion (i.e., percentage occurrence) for individual error patterns has been used to define the point at which instruction is necessary. Second, less complex patterns (i.e., those that typically develop earlier) should be chosen over more complex ones. Third, target patterns that represent the potential to have a marked effect on the student""s writing ability should receive some priority.
Once the language and literacy specialist has identified the error patterns of concern, the next phase of assessment involves developing hypotheses for the nature or cause of each error pattern. The present invention presents a method of performing such an assessment. In addition to the factors that may contribute to spelling development described above (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological knowledge), the language and literacy specialist also must determine a student""s orthographic knowledge and visual storage of spellings. Orthographic knowledge (xe2x80x9cOKxe2x80x9d) involves the set of skills necessary to translate language from spoken to written form (i.e., the use of spelling strategies). Abilities in this area range from early selection of the appropriate letters to represent consonant sounds to an understanding of sophisticated orthotactic principles. Examples of such knowledge include an appreciation for the principle that /k/ is spelled with a ck only in the medial or final position of words, never at the beginning. Similarly /t∫/ is spelled with ch in the initial word position and either tch or ch in the final position, depending upon vowel tenseness.
Visual storage, or visual orthographic images (xe2x80x9cVOIxe2x80x9d), refers to the representation of images or templates for words, morphemes, and syllables in memory. These templates are called Visual Orthographic Images (VOIs) and they are primarily developed through adequate exposure to print. It is possible that inadequate VOIs are related to the use of a partial-cues reading strategy by children. A partial cues reading strategy occurs when a child reads by selectively sampling parts of the word, usually the beginnings and endings and relies heavily on context to derive a reasonable guess. Use of this strategy may limit the formation of visual images necessary for accurate spelling. Handwriting may also affect the storage of visual orthographic images. Poor handwriting may inhibit the establishment of an adequate lexical representation in memory, which can, in turn, lead to compromised spelling skills. Glenn and Hurley caution that the early use of cursive writing might also make a child vulnerable to spelling problems due to the mismatch between the appearance of cursive and printed text. Given the potential negative contribution of cursive writing, language and literacy specialists may consider collecting data that are printed by the student.
When developing hypotheses about the nature of a student""s spelling difficulties, the language and literacy specialist will need to assess the student""s phonological and morphological awareness skills, as well as the student""s orthographic knowledge and visual storage. By determining which factor(s) may be causing or maintaining the spelling difficulties, the language and literacy specialist can develop specific goals for spelling instruction or intervention.